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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.